[KS] Koreanstudies Digest, Vol 133, Issue 12

[Frank Hoffmann]

> "Koreanists" might also find Naver's 'Nanum Gothic' (나눔 고딕) font
> family useful to add to their systems.

Well ...? No, I think Koreanists without the quotation marks will 
rather not want to do that.

The very point of the new (but unfortunately on a new Mac OS presently 
not yet working) fonts by Adobe & Google (Noto Sans CJK / 
SourceHanSans) is that they (a) include over 65,000 characters, (b) 
most all the other alphabets and special characters, and that (c) in 
various type faces such as Regular, Bold, etc. -- each as an (in a 
technical sense) separate font.

These Naver fonts, on the other hand, play like hundreds of others in a 
completely different league--that is soccer for the kindergarden, not 
world cup. So, you can use those for KOREAN design tasks, BUT ONLY if 
no other scripts than Han'gŭl, basic Hanja, and English needs to be 
used -- the fun already stops when you need French or German, or work 
on any sort of texts Koreanists usually do (e.g. including Hepburn 
romanization of some names or Sanskrit terms in transcription--you 
would then immediately have to use another font in a different typface!

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: test.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 200704 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20140718/f079f76a/attachment.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------


If you now look at what Latin letters this Nanum font includes ...

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Nanum_Myongjo_Regular.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 81358 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20140718/f079f76a/attachment-0001.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------


Obviously, that is what standard Korean fonts already included in 1985. 
But if you then look at, for example, Batang/바탕, you see that it 
ALSO, apart from over 60,000+ Chinese characters, includes all sort of 
accented characters. However, there is only this one REGULAR style, and 
the design for Latin letters is not as nice. It would therefore be good 
if everyone COULD use those new Noto Sans fonts, because we could then 
use the SAME font face for text in Latin letters and Korean and Chinese 
and Japanese ....

(BELOW is Batang)
 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Batang.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 189517 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20140718/f079f76a/attachment-0002.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------







--------------------------------------
Frank Hoffmann
http://koreanstudies.com